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Obama Wasn't on the Ballot

November 4 — Former Shorenstein Fellow Mike Tomasky comments on the 2009 election results: "What do these strange, odd-year elections — suddenly so feverishly important, now that America's excitable right-wingers from Rush Limbaugh on down demand that they be — tell us about Barack Obama's political health? Not very much, really." Continue reading at The Guardian

The Good-News Story

November 3 — Kathleen Parker writes a Washington Post column about Alex S. Jones's new book Losing the News: "Jones…manages to combine a dispassionate look at the news business with a page-turning story of traditional journalism's highs and lows. For Americans concerned about the fate of news, he breathes oxygen into the collapsing organ of the Fourth Estate. For inmates awaiting the guillotine, he is the governor's midnight call of reprieve. There is hope amid so much change. " Continue reading at The Washington Post

The Future of News

November 2 — The Shorenstein Center hosted a panel discussion co-sponsored by the Institute of Politics: "The future of news? There might not be one. Or if there is, newsgathering might require taking steps that go against the grain of newsroom ethics and tradition, with armies of untrained citizen journalists, for instance, or government funding that sets up a conflict of interest." Continue reading at the Harvard Gazette

Chicago News Venture to Sell Content to New York Times

October 22 — Spring 2009 Fellow Jim O'Shea starts Chicago news organization: "Former top editors of The Chicago Tribune and other journalists, backed by a public television station and a major foundation, on Thursday announced formation of a nonprofit news organization in Chicago, which will provide pages of local news for a Chicago edition of The New York Times, to be started next month." Continue reading at The New York Times

La Repubblica Editor Honored at Harvard for Leading Fight for Press Freedom

October 22 — The Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Shorenstein Center presented La Repubblica editor Ezio Mauro with a citation for leading the fight for press freedom in Italy. Press Release

Jack Nelson, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, dies at 80

October 21 — Jack Nelson, who was a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center in 2002, died today at his home in Bethesda, Md., of pancreatic cancer: "Nelson was recruited from the Atlanta Constitution in 1965 as part of publisher Otis Chandler's effort to transform The Times into one of the country's foremost dailies. An aggressive reporter who had exposed abuses at Georgia's biggest mental institution, Nelson went on to break major stories on the civil rights movement for The Times, particularly in his coverage of the shooting of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo and the massacre of black students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg." Continue reading at The Los Angeles Times

Read Nelson's paper published by the Shorenstein Center:
U.S. Government Secrecy and the Current Crackdown on Leaks

Held by the Taliban

October 19 — Former Shorenstein Center Fellow and New York Times reporter David Rohde reflects on his experiences in captivity in a new five-part series: "The car's engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.

Another gunman in the passenger seat turned and stared at us as he gripped his Kalashnikov rifle. No one spoke. I glanced at the bleak landscape outside — reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see — and feared we would be dead within minutes." Continue reading at The New York Times

Hillary Reborn

October 16 — John Heilemann, HKS alum, writes about Secretary of State Clinton: "Hillary Clinton was on the trot again this week, with an itinerary that took her from Zurich to London to Dublin to Belfast to Moscow and a nonstop schedule of diplomatizing on topics ranging from the normalization of Turkish-Armenian relations to the Iranian nuclear crisis. But the headlines Hillary generated back home — and there were plenty of them — had precious little to do with her official duties as Secretary of State." Continue reading at New York magazine

A Weighty Subject

October 7 — Shorenstein Center director Alex S. Jones speaks with the Columbia Journalism Review about his new book Losing the News: "It's mainly written for people who are concerned about news but don't understand journalism very well and don't understand what has happened to journalism and don't understand what's important about what's happening." Continue reading at CJR

The National Parks: America's Best Idea

October 7 — Former Fellow Dayton Duncan is author of The National Parks: America's Best Idea, a new PBS special and companion book: "Both projects come not a moment too soon, for our open spaces are once again under siege. A new law permits concealed and loaded guns in national parks — which many rangers fear will lead to increased wildlife poaching." Continue reading at The Los Angeles Times

Citizen Conversation with Dan Okrent

September 30 — Visiting Murrow Lecturer Dan Okrent talks about the business of journalism in an interview with HKS's The Citizen: "We have a perpetual obligation to correct inaccuracies. If there is one thing that we can ask of journalists, it's, 'Get the facts right.'" Continue reading at The Citizen

To Cover World, CBS Joins With a News Site

September 27 — Advisory board member Phil Balboni and GlobalPost team up with CBS: "Having a broadcast network partner was a high priority for us, and to be associated with CBS News is a great validation of what we are trying to build...We hope to become an important source of international news for Americans, and this partnership is a big step in that direction. " Continue reading at The New York Times

Detroit: The Death — and Possible Life — of a Great American City

September 24 — Visiting Murrow Lecturer and Detroit native Dan Okrent examines the plight of the struggling city: "...the story of Detroit is not simply one of a great city's collapse. It's also about the erosion of the industries that helped build the country we know today. The ultimate fate of Detroit will reveal much about the character of America in the 21st century. If what was once the most prosperous manufacturing city in the nation has been brought to its knees, what does that say about our recent past? And if it can't find a way to get up, what does that say about our future?" Continue reading at Time magazine

Reporting on the Threat Posed When Reliable Reporting Fades Away

September 23 — Shorenstein director Alex S. Jones's new book reviewed in The Boston Globe: "Losing the News is one of the clearest assessments to date of the sweeping technological and financial changes that overturned the modern tradition of objective newsgathering and dissemination. Now that the medium is endangered, so is the message, Jones writes. The availability of an 'iron core' of news — carefully reported facts and information allowing citizens in a democracy to make informed decisions — rests on the edge of a knife." Continue reading at The Boston Globe

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